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Black Zodiac
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award
Black Zodiac offers poems suffused with spiritual longing—lyrical meditations on faith, religion, heritage, and morality. The poems also explore aging and mortality with restless grace. Approaching his vast subjects by way of small moments, Wright magnifies details to reveal truths much larger than the quotidian happenings that engendered them. His is an astonishing, flexible, domestic-yet-universal verse. As the critic Helen Vendler has observed, Wright is a poet who "sounds like nobody else."
Black Zodiac offers poems suffused with spiritual longing—lyrical meditations on faith, religion, heritage, and morality. The poems also explore aging and mortality with restless grace. Approaching his vast subjects by way of small moments, Wright magnifies details to reveal truths much larger than the quotidian happenings that engendered them. His is an astonishing, flexible, domestic-yet-universal verse. As the critic Helen Vendler has observed, Wright is a poet who "sounds like nobody else."
85 pages, Paperback
First published March 4, 1997
22 people are currently reading
1261 people want to read
About the author
Charles Wright
245 books110 followersCharles Wright is an American poet. He shared the National Book Award in 1983 for Country Music: Selected Early Poems and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for Black Zodiac.
From 2014 to 2015, he served as the 20th Poet Laureate of the United States. Charles Wright is often ranked as one of the best American poets of his generation. He attended Davidson College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop; he also served four years in the U.S. Army, and it was while stationed in Italy that Wright began to read and write poetry. He is the author of over 20 books of poetry.
Charles Wright is a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets and the Souder Family Professor of English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. His many collections of poetry and numerous awards—including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin International Poetry Prize, and a Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize—have proven that he is, as Jay Parini once said, “among the best poets” of his generation. Yet Wright remains stoic about such achievements: it is not the poet, but the poems, as he concluded to Genoways. “One wants one’s work to be paid attention to, but I hate personal attention. I just want everyone to read the poems. I want my poetry to get all the attention in the world, but I want to be the anonymous author.”
From 2014 to 2015, he served as the 20th Poet Laureate of the United States. Charles Wright is often ranked as one of the best American poets of his generation. He attended Davidson College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop; he also served four years in the U.S. Army, and it was while stationed in Italy that Wright began to read and write poetry. He is the author of over 20 books of poetry.
Charles Wright is a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets and the Souder Family Professor of English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. His many collections of poetry and numerous awards—including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin International Poetry Prize, and a Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize—have proven that he is, as Jay Parini once said, “among the best poets” of his generation. Yet Wright remains stoic about such achievements: it is not the poet, but the poems, as he concluded to Genoways. “One wants one’s work to be paid attention to, but I hate personal attention. I just want everyone to read the poems. I want my poetry to get all the attention in the world, but I want to be the anonymous author.”
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 69 reviews
November 11, 2020
James Longenbach describes this book as "haunting and elegiac" and really it is the book that you don't want to put aside after finishing it.
Time, like a burning wheel, scorching along by the highway side,
Reorganizing, relayering,
[...]
Poetry's what’s left between the lines—
a strange speech and a hard language,
It’s all in the unwritten, it’s all in the unsaid . . .
*
Jaundicing down from their purity, the plum blossoms
Snowfall out of the two trees
And spread like a sheet of mayflies
soundlessly, thick underfoot—
I am the silence that is incomprehensible ,
First snow stars drifting down from the sky
late fall in the other world;
I am the utterance of my name.
Belief in transcendence,
belief in something beyond belief,
Is what the blossoms solidify
In their fall through the two worlds—
The imaging of the invisible, the slow dream of metaphor,
Sanction our going up and our going down, our days
And the lives we infold inside them,
our yes and yes
*
Why do I have to carry you, unutterable?
Why do you shine out,
lost penny, unspendable thing,
Irreversible, unappeasable, luminous,
Recoursed on the far side of language?
Tomorrow’s our only hiding place,
November its last address—
such small griefs, such capture.
Insurmountable comforts.
And still I carry you. And still you continue to shine out.
*
We live in the wind-chill,
The what-if and what-was-not,
The blown and sour dust of just after or just before,
The metaquotidian landscape
of soft edge and abyss.
How hard to take the hard day and ease it in our hearts,
Its icicle and snowdrift and
its wind that keeps on blowing.
How hard to be as human as snow is, or as true,
So sure of its place and many names.
It holds the white light against its body, it benights our eyes.
The poem uncurls me, corrects me and croons my tune,
Its outfit sharp as the pressed horizon.
Time, like a burning wheel, scorching along by the highway side,
Reorganizing, relayering,
[...]
Poetry's what’s left between the lines—
a strange speech and a hard language,
It’s all in the unwritten, it’s all in the unsaid . . .
*
Jaundicing down from their purity, the plum blossoms
Snowfall out of the two trees
And spread like a sheet of mayflies
soundlessly, thick underfoot—
I am the silence that is incomprehensible ,
First snow stars drifting down from the sky
late fall in the other world;
I am the utterance of my name.
Belief in transcendence,
belief in something beyond belief,
Is what the blossoms solidify
In their fall through the two worlds—
The imaging of the invisible, the slow dream of metaphor,
Sanction our going up and our going down, our days
And the lives we infold inside them,
our yes and yes
*
Why do I have to carry you, unutterable?
Why do you shine out,
lost penny, unspendable thing,
Irreversible, unappeasable, luminous,
Recoursed on the far side of language?
Tomorrow’s our only hiding place,
November its last address—
such small griefs, such capture.
Insurmountable comforts.
And still I carry you. And still you continue to shine out.
*
We live in the wind-chill,
The what-if and what-was-not,
The blown and sour dust of just after or just before,
The metaquotidian landscape
of soft edge and abyss.
How hard to take the hard day and ease it in our hearts,
Its icicle and snowdrift and
its wind that keeps on blowing.
How hard to be as human as snow is, or as true,
So sure of its place and many names.
It holds the white light against its body, it benights our eyes.
The poem uncurls me, corrects me and croons my tune,
Its outfit sharp as the pressed horizon.
May 27, 2018
That fire’s the light our names are carved in.
Ultimately fatigue triumphed over delight.
I sorely need to reread the concluding third of this book as my eyes burned from a forced march of a day. The poet is not to blame. There is a just a desire, a hope to make things better.
The language in this tome is precisely jagged. There are exquisite images here this collection, ones as rapturous as the wounds of Saint Sebastian as evocative as the arc light craters outside Phnom Penh.
Everyone indulge and expiate.
Ultimately fatigue triumphed over delight.
I sorely need to reread the concluding third of this book as my eyes burned from a forced march of a day. The poet is not to blame. There is a just a desire, a hope to make things better.
The language in this tome is precisely jagged. There are exquisite images here this collection, ones as rapturous as the wounds of Saint Sebastian as evocative as the arc light craters outside Phnom Penh.
Everyone indulge and expiate.
December 4, 2013
My favorite Charles Wright book. These long poems jostle you around; I wish more poets were capable of doing that.
August 14, 2025
My favorite Charles Wright collection - lush, layered, and almost gluttonous in its beauty and meaning. I’ll read again in December.
December 4, 2013
Amazing! Absolutely Brilliant. First time in a while I've read a poetry collection from front to back. I love his juxtaposition of landscape and language, the unseen and the seen. Definitely will always return to this collection when I'm seeking inspiration.
Fav. Lines:
"What happens is what happens,
And what happened never existed to start with."
"It is the shape that matters, he said.
Indeed shape precludes shapelessness, as God precludes
Godlessness.
Form is the absence of all things. Like sin. Yes, like sin."
"The winder dark shatters around us like broken glass.
The morning sky opens its pink robe."
"I am the speech that cannot be grasped.
I am the substance and the thing that has no substance,
Cast forth upon the face of the earth,
Whose margins we write in,
whose one story we tell, and keep on telling."
"Love is more talked about than surrendered to. Lie low,
Meng Chiao advises-
beauty too close will ruin your life.
Fav. Lines:
"What happens is what happens,
And what happened never existed to start with."
"It is the shape that matters, he said.
Indeed shape precludes shapelessness, as God precludes
Godlessness.
Form is the absence of all things. Like sin. Yes, like sin."
"The winder dark shatters around us like broken glass.
The morning sky opens its pink robe."
"I am the speech that cannot be grasped.
I am the substance and the thing that has no substance,
Cast forth upon the face of the earth,
Whose margins we write in,
whose one story we tell, and keep on telling."
"Love is more talked about than surrendered to. Lie low,
Meng Chiao advises-
beauty too close will ruin your life.
January 23, 2016
What I remember redeems me,
strips me and brings me to rest,
An end to what has begun,
A beginning to what is about to be ended.
- “Apologia Pro Vita Sua”
Just the kind of poetry I like: lush but decipherable. Really gorgeous lines but compelling and thought-provoking all at once. I feel foolishly proud, as if it had anything to do with me, to live where a poet of Wright’s caliber makes his home.
All things aspire to weightlessness,
some place beyond the lip of language,
Some silence, some zone of grace,
Sky white as raw silk,
opening mirror cold-sprung in the west,
Sunset like dead grass.
If God hurt the way we hurt,
he, too, would be heart-sore,
Disconsolate, unappeasable.
- “Poem Half in the Manner of Li Ho”
March 3, 2017
As with Chickamauga: Poems (the only other collection I've read), Charles Wright explores connections between spirituality, landscape, and art. He's a master at the long line; his poems sprawl across the page, full of ellipses and dashes, beginning left and then right, utilizing the entire page. I kind of have to work at his poems, which is a good thing.
October 22, 2008
I have a tendency to prefer earlier poetry by many poets to their later works. I think of this as a fault of my own, my inability to keep up with their artistic development. Charles Wright is one of my all-time favorite poets, and reading this book, I felt more of a kinship towards his older pieces. So I read the book three times because I am not willing to give up on Charles Wright and myself that easily. Finally I came to love it, and recognized that my own predisposition to dislike too much autobiographical reference that seems only personally attached to the poem (and not necessarily accessible to the reader) is perhaps my refusal to work hard enough. Or maybe I am just getting older myself and can get past what at first blush seems like only nostalgia.
And may I say something about the hullabaloo about the upside down Chinese characters on the cover. I asked my husband, who is Japanese, if he could read the characters (because I can't, but I only read Japanese at a third-grade level) and he couldn't either. We both agree that it looks upside down because of the stroke direction, but also agree that in particular since we can't identify it (yes, it is probably Chinese, but Japanese characters are based on the Chinese characters, and in fact one of the scribblings on the cover looks distinctly like hiragana, which is a syllabic writing system used only in Japanese, and not in Chinese), Wright has a right to use it artistically as he likes. Everyone who says he got it wrong may be assuming he wanted it rightside up. Sheeeesh. (And they are also assuming he had a lot of say in the cover design, which also may not be true.)
And may I say something about the hullabaloo about the upside down Chinese characters on the cover. I asked my husband, who is Japanese, if he could read the characters (because I can't, but I only read Japanese at a third-grade level) and he couldn't either. We both agree that it looks upside down because of the stroke direction, but also agree that in particular since we can't identify it (yes, it is probably Chinese, but Japanese characters are based on the Chinese characters, and in fact one of the scribblings on the cover looks distinctly like hiragana, which is a syllabic writing system used only in Japanese, and not in Chinese), Wright has a right to use it artistically as he likes. Everyone who says he got it wrong may be assuming he wanted it rightside up. Sheeeesh. (And they are also assuming he had a lot of say in the cover design, which also may not be true.)
December 4, 2013
It's not quite a thesis, but the touchstone for this and much of Wright's work is that "Landscape is a lever of transcendence." Much of his work moves like a journal, a series of connected rumination on a subject or idea. Ideas, like the clouds that so often draw him here, drift through these pages. For Wright, there is absolutely a spiritual dimension to life, a dimension that can be sought but likely never grasped. I'll let him say it:
"We hang like clouds between heaven and earth
between something and nothing,
Sometimes with shadows, sometimes without."
"We hang like clouds between heaven and earth
between something and nothing,
Sometimes with shadows, sometimes without."
March 18, 2019
“Poetry’s what’s left between the lines —
a strange speech and a hard language,
It’s all in the unwritten, it’s all in the unsaid...
And that’s a comfort, I think,
for our lack and inarticulation.”
a strange speech and a hard language,
It’s all in the unwritten, it’s all in the unsaid...
And that’s a comfort, I think,
for our lack and inarticulation.”
October 19, 2020
I needed a lot of rereading just to get some momentum. I'm not sure i ever figured out how to read Wright right. All the reviewers seem to see very clearly that these are spiritual poems. To me they felt exclusively intellectual. They reminded me (and i don't mean this as a humble brag because what follows is actually an insult and i know it is) of the poems i tried to write when i was in my twenties. Sometimes they felt devoid of emotion (Wright's true poems and my attempts at poems). At least with Wright, i believe the there is there, though i couldn't find my way there.
I wouldn't discourage people from reading this collection. It just wasn't for me-now.
I wouldn't discourage people from reading this collection. It just wasn't for me-now.
January 27, 2025
I actually don’t have words. Some books win a Pulitzer and I’m like “really?” But not this one. This one makes sense.
February 28, 2017
I loved the form and arc of this book as well as the genius of the poems.
March 2, 2016
The big demerit I give this book will hardly seem a problem to those sympathetic with the author's POV. I loathe the kind of mushy and undefined "spirituality" that many people have when they say, "I'm a very spiritual person." I have no idea that that means, other then they do not bother with logic when it comes to their beliefs.
I do not know if Charles Wright ever said anything this silly, but that attitude is the only way I can make sense of many of these poems. He does have a gift for language and putting together ideas that we do not usually see together to expand our minds, but often, or at least too often, this mushy spirituality becomes a part of some poems, often near the end, and I repeatedly wondered why.
The answer, of course, is that the spirituality is Wright's whole point, but it pointed me in the direction of giving this book three stars instead of five. I applaud his talent, but not his mushiness.
I do not know if Charles Wright ever said anything this silly, but that attitude is the only way I can make sense of many of these poems. He does have a gift for language and putting together ideas that we do not usually see together to expand our minds, but often, or at least too often, this mushy spirituality becomes a part of some poems, often near the end, and I repeatedly wondered why.
The answer, of course, is that the spirituality is Wright's whole point, but it pointed me in the direction of giving this book three stars instead of five. I applaud his talent, but not his mushiness.
December 3, 2014
It's possible that I'll come back to this one with five stars later; I've had to speed-read it for a class, which does no book much justice and this one even less. I've loved it so far, loved its melancholy; its self-conscious meta-religious search for something to cling to in the face of aging and death; its sheer textural beauty. But it's also a bit plangent, a bit heavy on the allusion for my tastes. The collection certainly works as a whole, but in the spots where it doesn't, the failure's due to the self-indulgent excesses of artistical poetical poeticalness.
However. This is a haunting, achingly profound book whose flaws are hard-pressed to do anything more than act as counterpoint to its beauty. I look forward to returning to it at leisure.
However. This is a haunting, achingly profound book whose flaws are hard-pressed to do anything more than act as counterpoint to its beauty. I look forward to returning to it at leisure.
January 24, 2014
Such a relief to read beautiful language after plodding through Sartre, and so many common themes between the two.
"-the love of loss/ Light as a locket around my neck, idea of absence/Hard and bright as a dime inside my trouser pocket." (from lives of the artists pg 42)
(Also see poem 'envoi')
Once again, I connect clearly so much better to poetry and fable, than to the stripped bare language of philosophy.
Poetry is like an old friend: "My friend who in the old days, with a sentence or two,/ Would easily set things right" (14)
Poems on aging, dying, and being. Poems often connected to nature and to the visual arts. Language that embraces.
"-the love of loss/ Light as a locket around my neck, idea of absence/Hard and bright as a dime inside my trouser pocket." (from lives of the artists pg 42)
(Also see poem 'envoi')
Once again, I connect clearly so much better to poetry and fable, than to the stripped bare language of philosophy.
Poetry is like an old friend: "My friend who in the old days, with a sentence or two,/ Would easily set things right" (14)
Poems on aging, dying, and being. Poems often connected to nature and to the visual arts. Language that embraces.
September 13, 2007
I keep moving forward and backward throughout this book. I feel no compunction to read it through chronologically—and I find that it enhances my ability to understand each of the tender hooks that hold together the pieces of this work. Wright's poetic imagination is immense, and his leaps of logic and phrase border on the divine--not as in fat cherubs playing harps or old ladies ogling a waiter, but in the sense of being at once beyond and within human understanding. We can understand when we listen, not when we think.
June 22, 2014
We go to our graves with secondary affections,
Second-hand satisfaction, half-souled,
star charts demagnetized.
We go in our best suits. The birds are flying. Clouds pass.
Sure we're cold and untouchable,
but we harbor no ill will.
No tooth tuned to resentment's fork,
we're out of here, and sweet meat.
Calligraphers of the disembodied, God's word-wards,
What letters will we illuminate?
Second-hand satisfaction, half-souled,
star charts demagnetized.
We go in our best suits. The birds are flying. Clouds pass.
Sure we're cold and untouchable,
but we harbor no ill will.
No tooth tuned to resentment's fork,
we're out of here, and sweet meat.
Calligraphers of the disembodied, God's word-wards,
What letters will we illuminate?
May 13, 2010
"It's good to know certain things: / What's departed, in order to know what's left to come; / That water's immeasurable and incomprehensible // And blows in the air / Where all that's fallen and silent becomes invisible; / That fire's the light our names are carved in."
an excerpt from, "Apologia Pro Vita Sua, pt III"
Probably my single favorite book of poems.
an excerpt from, "Apologia Pro Vita Sua, pt III"
Probably my single favorite book of poems.
Read
January 2, 2015I decided to read our new poet laureate's most famous poetry collection. There is no doubt this man can write. But I felt lost a lot during the course of these 83 pages. He is obsessed with the seasons, especially winter, and tends to focus on the American countryside. I'm too confused to rate this, but I did like it. Conflicted.
January 27, 2008
This book won a ton of awards. If you read it you'll know why. Wright is perhaps my favorite living poet, having the ability to compare some of the greatest works of art and artists with an image of his backyard. Brilliant.
March 7, 2017
One of the best books of poetry I've read. Will be returning to after I read more of his books. Favorites:
Meditation on Form and Measure
Meditation on Summer and Shapelessness
October II
Lives of the Saints
Lives of the Artists
Black Zodiac
Disjecta Membra
Meditation on Form and Measure
Meditation on Summer and Shapelessness
October II
Lives of the Saints
Lives of the Artists
Black Zodiac
Disjecta Membra
July 3, 2015
It will be years before I can give these poems the reading that they deserve. Still, I'm happy to have encountered them. With the literary and cultural allusions, each poem rewards a close reading and study. I feel like a failure reading these poems.
January 18, 2016
“O April. The year begins beyond words, Beyond myself and the image of myself, beyond Moon’s ice and summer’s thunder. All that.” These lines from “Apologia Pro Vita Sua” are typical of Charles Wright’s poetry. Black Zodiac won Wright the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1997.
February 15, 2009
My favorite Wright, and one of the best books of poetry I've yet found. It's one to own.
June 26, 2009
I won't pretend to understand the poetry, but the imagery is some of the most astonishing and fascinating I've ever read.
August 4, 2009
Each of these poems has two or three lines that are devastatingly beautiful and twenty or thirty lines that are just kind of meh-ish.
July 15, 2011
Charles Simic once said when asked what he'd say his poetry is "about" that it was a difficult question because then Charles Wright wrote about the weather in Charlottesville, VA. Love.
May 9, 2013
Charles Wright gets better the older he gets. I'm reading through his entire collection of poetry over the decades and this is his best yet. Highly recommended.
August 15, 2014
This book taught me a story about how our poet laureate once had an all-night ragin boner when he was nine:
"Nine years old! My dick! All night!"
You should read this book.
"Nine years old! My dick! All night!"
You should read this book.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 69 reviews